Strategist, entrepreneur and commentator Craig Coogan examines issues with his unique perspective. NOTE: The views expressed in this blog are of the author (Craig Coogan) alone. They do not represent any organization, client, or business that he may be associated with. You are welcome to comment below. Thank you for reading!

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Public Privacy

“April Fools” is an expression used as the punch line to
many a gag the other day. April 1 has been
a day of jokes going back to Chaucer’s Canterbury
tales in 1392. I love
frivolity, humor and a good gag as much (if not more so) than anybody. With my self-depreciating sense of humor, I’m
also a good sport about being the brunt of a joke. I’m less enamored with the three separate
incidents this week that show how our privacy has gone public...really the basis of what should be a bad joke but isn't.

The Supreme Court authorized
strip searches of people arrested – even for minor incidents. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled against a
New Jersey man who was strip searched in two county jails following his arrest
on a warrant for an unpaid fine that he had, in reality, paid. This decision makes the TSA seem restrained. Certainly nobody wants guards to be at
risk. If there’s a reasonable suspicion
the practice has been to then do a strip-search with approval – now that bureaucratic
process isn’t needed.

There are centuries of case law in the U.S. jurisprudence that
support rudimentary approvals by government authority that infringe on
individual rights. If somebody is
suspected of a particular crime and there’s an amount of evidence to suggest it
– a judge can approve a warrant to have that person’s mail read, conversations
bugged, emails traced, etc. At one time
the threshold for such a warrant was pretty high, but since the “War on Terror”
it’s largely a rubber stamp. Now getting
judicial approval is apparently too cumbersome.

Wired Magazine’s April cover story is about the NSA (National Security Agency) building the largest
spy center in the world in Utah that will gather data from around the country. “In secret listening rooms nationwide, NSA
software examines every email, phone call and tweet as they zip by." No warrant or reasonable suspicion is needed. According to the article, the NSA is nearly
finished creating an automated algorithm that will determine which people need
to be investigated based on what they write and tweet.

“The Former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close
together: ‘We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.’” He’s a former NSA official – so he’s a lot
more generous than this Libertarian.

Not to be outdone, our friends across the pond are also
stepping up their surveillance.
Londoners already are captured on video an average of 300 times per day but now the U.K. government is preparing proposals for a nationwide electronic surveillance
network that could potentially keep track of every message sent by any Brit to
anyone at any time.

Similar programs were started and abandoned in the U.S.
(2003) and the U.K. (2008) after public outcries. Less than a decade later billions of dollars
have gone into the building of the network, and the Wired story is just the
latest ‘expose’ to draw attention to the elimination of privacy. Where’s the public outcry?

Today we all share freely about our lives on Facebook and
other social media sites. Has that sharing
desensitized us to the value of ‘innocent until proven guilty’? Has the convenience of having nearly any
piece of information instantaneously at our fingertips reduced our resistance to the
protections of the Fourth Amendment? Maybe people trust the government more today
than just a few years ago? A nice punch
line...but the real joke is on us for allowing our privacy to go public without
a hue and cry.